Rolling Stones Tickets Gather Moss as $600 Seats for Sale

By Andy Fixmer -
May 2, 2013

The Rolling Stones are finding out: you can’t always get what you want.

With the group’s “50 and Counting” tour kicking off in Los Angeles on May 3, pairs of $600 floor seats were still available yesterday for Staples Center arena, based on the sales website of Anschutz Entertainment Group Inc., the Staples owner and promoter of the Rolling Stones tour.

“To anyone not working in investment banking, these are extremely expensive tickets,” said Gary Bongiovanni, editor-in-chief of Pollstar, a concert-industry magazine.

To fill Staples Center, AEG has begun lowering prices. More $85 tickets are being made available, the band said on April 30 at Rollingstones.com. Those were the only tickets sold out for the May 3 show, according to the AEG website.

“By the time the show starts, they’ll fill every seat at the arena,” Bongiovanni said in a phone interview. “It just won’t be with people who paid $600 a seat.”

AEG said in a statement the date of the first show had to be moved by a day because of professional basketball and hockey playoffs at Staples, requiring the company to offer refunds to some fans.

“We fully expect Friday’s Staples Center show to be sold out and are very pleased with ticket sales for all upcoming shows,” Los Angeles-based AEG said.

Bob Lefsetz, publisher of an industry e-mail newsletter, wrote about the availability of seats yesterday.

Nine Cities

The Stones announced plans for a nine-city North American tour on April 3, including shows in Oakland, Anaheim and San Jose, California, Las Vegas, Toronto, Chicago, Boston and Philadelphia. A Montreal stop was added on April 16. No dates are planned for New York.

Last year, the Stones marked their 50th anniversary, having first played at the Marquee Club in London in 1962. They played dates at the O2 London, Brooklyn’s Barclays Center, New York, and the Prudential Center Newark.

The last major tour by Mick Jagger’s men was A Bigger Bang, which had revenue of $558 million from 2005 to 2007, according to Billboard. The U2 360 shows generated a record $736 million from 2009 to 2011, overtaking the Stones, Billboard reported.